Everyone around you is awful (and you may be on your way there too, if you're not already!) and school is hard and seriously what the hell is this Pennoyer v. Neff shit - but it's a load of artificial stress. Stupid, pointless, fake. The system is designed to generate anxiety, but the system is stupid. I encourage you to develop contempt for it.

Rules:

If you're anxious I will tell you it will all be OK: Post ITT about what's bugging you, stressing you out, or making you blue.

No being a jerk: I promise to be nice ITT and will just marry/ignore anybody who tries to argue / discuss line drawing / deride others ITT.

No strategy or advice: The rest of the website is for that. Go nuts planning your route to SCOTUS elsewhere.

I've got legendary cold caller that destroys you if you're not on your A game in CivPro so I find myself just reading and re-reading the notes from the night before during class so that if I am called on, I know what I'm talking about. So instead of taking notes during class, I do that. I've gotten a few outlines from 2Ls that did well in his class though so.. idk, should i be worried? start taking notes in class instead of prepping to be cold called?

desiballa21 wrote:I've got legendary cold caller that destroys you if you're not on your A game in CivPro so I find myself just reading and re-reading the notes from the night before during class so that if I am called on, I know what I'm talking about. So instead of taking notes during class, I do that. I've gotten a few outlines from 2Ls that did well in his class though so.. idk, should i be worried? start taking notes in class instead of prepping to be cold called?

Cold calling really doesn't matter. There's no need to stress about it, even though it seems rational now. If you get cold called and it doesn't go well, that's a good day for you - your friends have the exact same fear and will feel a lot of sympathy for you. You're all in it together, nobody wants to get cold called, and everyone has bad days.

Prepare for it if you want to and think it's helping, but don't feel pressured to. It won't matter for the exam or even really for your reputation, it's all just mind games.

The stress of other people studying 24/7 is bogging me down. I've been going out, having fun, doing the readings about 75% of the time (with the rest being occasional skimming/canned briefs). Am I doing something very wrong here? I don't wake up at 6am and study/class until 10pm. I'm not sure if I need to put those kind of hours in right now or not.

Teflon_Don wrote:The stress of other people studying 24/7 is bogging me down. I've been going out, having fun, doing the readings about 75% of the time (with the rest being occasional skimming/canned briefs). Am I doing something very wrong here? I don't wake up at 6am and study/class until 10pm. I'm not sure if I need to put those kind of hours in right now or not.

You don't need to study hard to do well, you only have to study hard to try and quiet your own anxiety or instill it in others. You can ace an open book law school exam having never done the reading or attended class if you put in 3 days with a solid outline.

Teflon_Don wrote:The stress of other people studying 24/7 is bogging me down. I've been going out, having fun, doing the readings about 75% of the time (with the rest being occasional skimming/canned briefs). Am I doing something very wrong here? I don't wake up at 6am and study/class until 10pm. I'm not sure if I need to put those kind of hours in right now or not.

So much this. I feel alright until I look around and see people reading supplements, outlining from day 1, and studying for hours. I just do the readings and make sure I understand what's going on in them. What else is there to study? Am I missing something completely?

Teflon_Don wrote:The stress of other people studying 24/7 is bogging me down. I've been going out, having fun, doing the readings about 75% of the time (with the rest being occasional skimming/canned briefs). Am I doing something very wrong here? I don't wake up at 6am and study/class until 10pm. I'm not sure if I need to put those kind of hours in right now or not.

So much this. I feel alright until I look around and see people reading supplements, outlining from day 1, and studying for hours. I just do the readings and make sure I understand what's going on in them. What else is there to study? Am I missing something completely?

Get out of the library. You aren't missing anything. There's no big secret. Please feel free to privately judge people who read every case twice, listen to recording of lectures twice, buy at least two hornbooks for every class, etc.

You may be stressed, and hard work will help, but never lose sight of the fact that this is not a contents about who can work the hardest. The reward for being the biggest grinder is often a random assortment of grades that average out to median.

Joseph Glannon, The Law of Torts 3rd Edition, page 575 wrote:It’s a dirty little secret that you really don’t have to know an awful lot of law to do well on a first year exam. Sure, you need to study the material and have a good grasp of the basic doctrines you studied. But most of the issues – even those much more difficult than the [issue discussed in a prior paragraph] – involve sophisticated application of basic doctrine rather than encyclopedic knowledge of the farthest reaches of the torts landscape. Most students spend inordinate amounts of time learning more and more rules, and very little time practicing the skill of applying the fundamental rules to new facts. You would be wiser to spend less time memorizing rules and more time applying them.

Joseph Glannon, The Law of Torts 3rd Edition, page 575 wrote:It’s a dirty little secret that you really don’t have to know an awful lot of law to do well on a first year exam. Sure, you need to study the material and have a good grasp of the basic doctrines you studied. But most of the issues – even those much more difficult than the [issue discussed in a prior paragraph] – involve sophisticated application of basic doctrine rather than encyclopedic knowledge of the farthest reaches of the torts landscape. Most students spend inordinate amounts of time learning more and more rules, and very little time practicing the skill of applying the fundamental rules to new facts. You would be wiser to spend less time memorizing rules and more time applying them.

He knows what's up. Gotta make weekend plans to de-stress... get your inner zen on and get out to nature

thesealocust: My school has started doing mid terms worth a good chunk of your grade in it which happen in a couple weeks. I'm stressing because I WANT to start practicing learning how to apply law to facts but I'm not sure how to at this early stage in the semester. I feel unprepared. How do I take care of that anxiety.

sf_39 wrote:thesealocust: My school has started doing mid terms worth a good chunk of your grade in it which happen in a couple weeks. I'm stressing because I WANT to start practicing learning how to apply law to facts but I'm not sure how to at this early stage in the semester. I feel unprepared. How do I take care of that anxiety.

If you feel unprepared, try to do something productive? Try to find practice exams or questions at the back of an E&E or something.

But it is very early, even with a midterm coming up. So you shouldn't feel behind or anything.

I have a prof who notes (in red) on the seating chart who wasn't prepared when she cold-called them. I live in terror of receiving a red mark, b/c she told us she reserves the right to adjust our grade up or down slightly depending on our level of preparedness in class. This has resulted in my spending lots of time making sure I know the cases in the readings. I stopped briefing and started doing book briefs, but now that I've realized that she likes to ask for specific language from the cases, I'm questioning my decision. My jaw has been permanently clenched for a month. I know I'm prepared, but I feel like it's never enough. The fact that LRW is so time-intensive is not helping my stress levels.

Any tips sealocust? Like, just settle down and accept that I'm prepared when all evidence indicates such?

chem! wrote:I have a prof who notes (in red) on the seating chart who wasn't prepared when she cold-called them. I live in terror of receiving a red mark, b/c she told us she reserves the right to adjust our grade up or down slightly depending on our level of preparedness in class. This has resulted in my spending lots of time making sure I know the cases in the readings. I stopped briefing and started doing book briefs, but now that I've realized that she likes to ask for specific language from the cases, I'm questioning my decision. My jaw has been permanently clenched for a month. I know I'm prepared, but I feel like it's never enough. The fact that LRW is so time-intensive is not helping my stress levels.

Any tips sealocust? Like, just settle down and accept that I'm prepared when all evidence indicates such?

Yep, psychological warfare. By all means, do your reading and arrive for class prepared, but remember it's not the ultimate goal.

The whole purpose of this is to make you scared, to make you feel unprepared, to ask for things you aren't likely to know. You'll do your best and work with what you have and it will be fine. The whole point of cold calling and the Socratic method is to make it kind of an impossible challenge for you.

Basically, you should relax your jaw a bit because you're just mired in a system that's set up to be painful. So there's nothing to fear, even if you can't stop the pain and all of the anxiety, because you're supposed to be struggling and confused. Par for the course, everyone goes through it. The prof, if looking for anything, is looking for tenacity and the ability to work through the harshness - not instant perfection.

As to the end results, professors are lazy and blind grading is sacred; you'll see almost every prof "reserve the right" to adjust grades and very few do it in practice, even fewer in a way that you'd ever even know about. When they say unprepared, they really do mean didn't show / didn't do the reading, not "couldn't get the exact right answer in the exact right amount of time." If you did the work, you won't ever hurt yourself by being wrong in class.

I was chilling in a book store once, and I picked up a random quotes-plus-images-cheesy-whatever book that had one I liked:

Strength is being able to break the rock, courage is being able to let the rock break on you.

Anyway, I hate law school partially because it seems set up to hurt and set up to be a sorting hat that might also teach you something by accident along the way. Easier to cope with while being aware of that fact, and not giving it any reverence it doesn't deserve, though.

sublime wrote:If finding yourself stressed, do you view meditation as useful? It seems to be pretty well backed scientifically, although I always feel like I am wasting time... however, it is more likely that despite promises to myself, I haven't ever developed a consistent practice. Thoughts?

Mindfulness meditation is cool, but the science has a lot of trouble divorcing "meditation" from "relaxation generally." Certainly helps though!